The voices of all the people in this video.

I have thought of a way to get more representation of women in video games. I was inspired by the latest Feminist Frequency video, which asks “Are Women Too Hard To Animate?”

And my first thought was yeah, well, boob physics is really hard and requires adding lots more math to the code, if you want to be properly salacious.

And my second thought was gosh, game programmers must be really lazy.

And my third thought was that game programmers sure put a lot of thought into sexualizing their games.

And that’s when my new idea popped into my head. Have you ever seen a naked man running? There’s this small dangly bit that you can’t avoid noticing that is bouncing and flopping and twirling as they move, and it can even, sometimes, change shape in response to the environment. I imagine simulating penis physics is even harder than boob physics, and you can’t cheat and just have an immobile lump down there on a naked man, because all the viewers would see that as sad and sick (either that, or it’s really cold in the game environment), especially the male viewers.

So that’s my solution. We have to demand more male nudity in video games, and not just when they’re standing around — we must insist on full frontal nakedness in action shots. And of course, there must be graphical accuracy in the animation.

Imagine the design phase of games. Everytime the designers suggest a male protagonist, the programmers will say “Aww, man, that’s gonna be hard, I’m gonna have to spend weeks coding shape-shifting pendulums, and then we’re going to have to spend months playtesting his junk. Can we just have the hero be a woman?”

This is going to work. It draws on what are clearly entirely natural impulses in programmers: to throw in lots of sex, while doing as little creative work as possible.

Read the story of Laurie Luhn, who was abused by Roger Ailes for 20 years. This is a case where someone gave in to the sexual demands of her boss…and all it got her was misery.

And $3 million in hush money.

I suspect Ailes is also getting a substantial cash buyout from Fox News, too.

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Ash Whitaker is a transgender boy in Wisconsin, and school officials are having difficulty dealing with it. So they’ve come up with a not at all novel solution.

A federal Title IX lawsuit filed in Wisconsin on Tuesday alleges that the Kenosha Unified School District instructed guidance counselors to have Ash Whitaker, a 16-year old transgender boy, and “any other transgender students at the school” wear “bright green wristbands” so that the school could “more easily monitor and enforce [their] restroom usage.”

First come the colorful wristbands, then the big bold armbands, then a symbol stitched to all of their clothing, and then tattoos.

Just a suggestion: the problem isn’t with Ash Whitaker, it’s with people who think they need to monitor restroom usage…which, when you think about it, is really creepy.

I was just reading this post by Shiv about the expectations of femininity, making the point that there is a huge role for perception in how we react to sex-based phenomena — women are supposed to be hyper-emotional, even when they’re not, and we’ve all got this idea that extremely high level cognitive/emotional phenomena can be reduced to a simplistic measure of how much of which steroid you’ve got in your blood.

Here’s the thing: I’ve read the literature attempting to link estrogen to anything but physiology. It’s quite desperate. It’s EvoPsych levels of bad. The problem is that even if you do find a correlation, there’s a million and one moving parts–the biggest problem being “how do you measure levels of emotionality.” In the absence of anything remotely convincing, I remain skeptical of the exact role estrogen supposedly plays on emotional expression. It is far too convenient for these poorly designed experiments to support cultural stereotypes. The problem runs so deep that we’re asking the wrong question–how, exactly, does one measure the null hypothesis? Are you able to reasonably assess stoicism without the gender of the subject prejudicing your measurement?

Men don’t cry, but it’s not because testosterone dries up your tear ducts — it’s because men are mocked fiercely if they show that kind of emotion. Women are supposed to be emotionally expressive, but it’s not because estrogen somehow disinhibits emotional centers of the brain, but because they’re conditioned by years of expectations that girls are supposed to be this way.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and different cultures have different expectations of gendered behavior, and that is what shapes us most. One of the best discussions I’ve seen of that is in Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, in which she takes a cold hard anthropological look at the myth of the woman enslaved by her instinct for mothering, and shows that it’s bunk.

And then I ran across this commercial, which is the most fucking macho thing ever. There’s a lot of blood in it, so you may not want to watch it. It’s an ad for feminine napkins.

Who we are is partly a product of biology (but there’s more commonality between men and women than our sexist society wants to accept), but how we think of ourselves is a matter of attitude.

I’d heard the stories, but I had no idea how awful William Shatner was. And then…

And then…

Thousands of fans turned out for Montreal Comic-Con July 8-10, many to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. Overall, the mood was positive, forward-looking, and particularly supportive of diversity in the franchise. But then William Shatner opened his mouth, and took us all back in time (not in a fun Voyage Home way) with a string of sexist jokes.

And no, they weren’t even funny sexist jokes. They just kind of flopped there, looking stupid. He even repeated one of the more pointless ones three times.

So Leonard Nimoy turns out to be a thoughtful, interesting, enlightened human being, and he dies. William Shatner is a raging dillhole, and he lives forever. It all makes the old Star Trek really hard to watch.

Oh, hey, how about that Rogue One? No asshats involved in that one, I’m sure.

Ken Ham is disgusted. Ontario, Canada is going to allow an “X” designation in addition to “M” or “F” on their drivers licenses, for people who “do not exclusively identify as male or female”. This is unbiblical! Don’t you know that the Bible specifically prescribes what material must be present on your motor vehicle licenses? What is St Peter going to do when you die and you have to present your ID in order to go through the Pearly Gates?

But seriously, he’s concerned that this is a sign of creeping moral crepitude.

Many people in the church—especially young people—have been so influenced by the culture’s do-whatever-feels-right ethic that they accept whatever is popular, regardless of whether or not it contradicts God’s Word. Christian leaders and parents need to note this growing trend and teach their young people to think biblically, starting with God’s Word. That’s the only way we can raise up a generation that stands solidly on the Bible and the gospel of Jesus Christ. And they need to be reminded of Scripture such as, “But from the beginning of the creation, God “made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).

You can learn more about a compassionate, biblical response to transgender issues in the Answers magazine article, “Transgender Identity—Wishing Away God’s Design.”

Oh, this explains everything. Transgender men and women are making this choice because it’s popular. Declaring yourself to be a gender different from the socially imposed one is done simply to get oneself invited to all the chic parties and to be loved by all the other kids at school. But wait! That tract Ham cites, “Transgender Identity—Wishing Away God’s Design” includes this comment:

The rates of suicide among transgender people show the brokenness this choice causes. Paul McHugh, former Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist in chief, has noted in the Wall Street Journal that the suicide rate among transgender individuals is 20 times higher than in the normal population. Embracing transgender identity at the cultural level does not produce happiness and wholeness. It goes hand in hand with personal confusion and disorder.

So the apologists at Answers in Genesis are simultaneously declaring that transgender people are only in it for the popularity and happiness it brings, and recognizing that there are high rates of misery imposed on the transgender population. And they don’t even pause to realize the contradictions in their position.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It goes hand-in-hand with how they read the Bible — there are no contradictions here, while happily embracing both sides of every contradiction.

I cannot abide Gretchen Carlson, the awful co-host on the dumbest news show on Fox News, Fox & Friends, so I should be pleased that she has left her job…except that the reason takes all the joy out of it.

Carlson, who just announced that she was no longer working for Fox News on her Facebook page, alleges that she was fired because she rebuffed Ailes’s sexual advances. Carlson, who had spent 11 years at Fox News, alleges that her firing from Fox was a retaliatory move after she not only refused to have sex with Ailes, but also tried to challenge what she claims was unfair treatment from her male colleagues.

Among other things, Carlson alleges that Ailes told her last September that “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.” Carlson also claims that Ailes instructed her to turn around on multiple occasions so he could ogle her posterior, while also requesting that she wear outfits that showed off her figure.

You know, this is the kind of behavior I expected of Fox News, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

Carlson also accuses Steve Doocy, the guy who has been vying with Brian Kilmeade for the title of the dumbest guy on the dumbest show on Fox News, of also harassing her. Who knew Fox News could get even uglier?

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Carlson’s full complaint is available online (pdf).